Resources:
This page is dedicated to resources for economic anthropologists, from book titles to web sites. If you have a syllabus or web site that you would like to add to the resources page, please send us an email.
Syllabi:
Anthropological Perspectives on Global Issues (Richard Robbins)
Global Consumer Culture (Richard Wilk)
Anthropology and Development (Richard Wilk)
Economic Anthropology (Richard Wilk)
Economic Anthropology (Karl Rambo)
Economic Anthropology (Jeffrey Cohen)
Economic Ethnography (Andres Marroquin Gramajo)
People, Other Animals and Health (Melanie Rock)
Research in Economic Anthropology:
Research in Economic Anthropology (REA), founded in 1978, is the longest-running published annual series in Economic Anthropology. It aims to advance the comparative study of economic systems in their broader socio-cultural context.
The first twenty volumes of Research in Economic Anthropology were edited by Barry Isaac of the University of Cincinnati and published by JAI Press. For volumes 21-24, the series was under the editorship of Norbert Dannhaeuser and Cynthia Werner of Texas A&M University, and volumes were published by Elsevier/JAI. Volume 21-23 have been published; Volume 24 is in press. In the summer of 2005, the editorship of REA was transferred to Donald Wood at Akita University in Japan.
As before, under the new editorship, original empirical and theoretical works will appear in this refereed series, as well as contributions that review recent developments in particular sub-fields of economic anthropology. Each volume of REA contains approximately 10-15 papers by different authors.
Manuscripts for volume 27 are now being accepted by the editor. Manuscripts submitted by November 1st will definitely be considered for Volume 27. Manuscripts received after November 1st will be considered for Volume 27 as space permits.
Please address any questions to Donald Wood:
Donald C. Wood
Akita University School of Medicine
Department of Social Medicine
1-1-1 Hondo, Akita 010-8543 Japan
Phone (direct): 018-884-6244
From Outside Japan: 81-18-884-6244
Email: wood@med.akita-u.ac.jp
Books by Members:
Shepherd, Robert J. 2008. When Culture Goes to Market: Space, Place and Identity in an Urban Marketplace. New York & Bern: Peter Lang.
This is an ethnographic study of an historic weekend street market on Washington's Capitol Hill, focusing on social ties between vendors.
Tamar Diana Wilson. 2005. Subsidizing Capitalism: Brickmakers on the U.S.-Mexican Border. (Studies in the Anthropology of Work). Albany: SUNY Press. click here for book
In Mexico, self-employed brickmakers support capitalist enterprise by providing bricks to build hotels, factories, office buildings, and shopping malls at costs lower than those based on profit-making principles. Combining Chayanovian and neo-Marxist approaches, Subsidizing Capitalism asserts that the economic activities of these self-employed brickmakers may be considered counterhegemonic because they avoid proletarianization in the formal sector. Tamar Diana Wilson discusses the similarities between peasants and brickmakers, the structural position of garbage pickers in relation to brickmakers, the trajectory from piece worker to petty commodity producer to petty capitalist, the economic value of women's and children's work as part of the family labor force, and how the neopatriarchal household is intrinsic to petty commodity production. Interspersed throughout are short stories and poems that offer the brickmakers' perspectives and provide a rarely seen look into their lives.
Wells, E. Christian, and Karla L. Davis-Salazar (editors) 2007 Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado. click here for book
Based on a symposium organized for the 2003 AAA meeting in Chicago, Mesoamerican Ritual Economy: Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives is a newly published edited volume by Christian Wells and Karla Davis-Salazar. Wells explains that the book project “arose out of our dissatisfaction with political economy models that often don’t acknowledge how nonmaterial motives, such as emotion and spirituality, drive economic behavior.” Ritual economy, an alternative framework explored in the book, draws on insights from religious studies and economics to “expose for analysis the economic aspects of ritual as well as the ritual structuring of manufacture and exchange” in ancient and modern Mesoamerican societies. Along with Wells and Davis-Salazar, the contributors to the book include Sarah Barber (UCF), Frances Berdan (CSU-San Bernardino), Barbara Fash (Harvard), William Fash (Harvard), Antonia Foias (Williams C.), Arthur Joyce (UC-Boulder), Brigitte Kovacevich (Vanderbilt), Ben Nelson (ASU), Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría (UT-Austin), Katherine Spielmann (ASU), and John Watanabe (Dartmouth). The book is available from the University Press of Colorado (ISBN: 978-0-87081-871-4).
Richard Wilk. 2006. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford (UK): Berg Publishers. click here for book
Belize, a tiny corner of the Caribbean wedged into Central America, has been a fast food nation since buccaneers and pirates first stole ashore. As early as the 1600s it was already caught in the great paradox of globalization: how can you stay local and relish your own home cooking, while tasting the delights of the global marketplace? Menus, recipes and bad colonial poetry combine with Wilk's sharp anthropological insight to give an important new perspective on the perils and problems of globalization.
Richard Wilk and Lisa Cliggett. 2007. Economies And Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology (2nd edition). Boulder (CO):Westview Press. click here for book
More than any other anthropological subdiscipline, economic anthropology constantly questions and debates the practical motives of people as they go about their daily lives. Tracing the history of the dialog between anthropology and economics, Richard R. Wilk and Lisa C. Cliggett move economic anthropology beyond the narrow concerns of earlier debates and place the field directly at the center of current issues in the social sciences. They focus on the unique strengths of economic anthropology as a meeting place for symbolic and materialist approaches and for understanding human beings as both practical and cultural. In so doing, the authors argue for the wider relevance of economic anthropology to applied anthropology and identify other avenues for interaction with economics, sociology, and other social and behavioral sciences. The second edition of Economies and Societies contains an entirely new chapter on gifts and exchange that critically approaches the new literature in this area, as well as a thoroughly updated bibliography and guide for students for finding case studies in economic anthropology.
Lofgren, Orvar, and Richard Wilk, eds. 2007. Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis. Copenhagen (Denmark): Museum Tusculanum. click here for book
Have you ever heard of the cream effect or witnessed the power of cultural backdraft? Have you watched the slow process of fossilization or used the tactics of cultural stealth? You might be waiting for just the right word to describe what you have seen and done. This collection revitalizes the study of the cultural processes of stability and change. The 25 essays invent new processes for a rapidly changing world. They illustrate how different perspectives enrich cultural analysis and add a bit of playfulness and experimentation to a longstanding academic issue. The authors – from anthropology, European ethnology, sociology and cultural studies – are peeking into blind spots and looking under the furniture in order to understand why and how some kinds of social life become visible, while so many others remain unseen. This book will inspire researchers and students to develop new approaches in cultural analysis.
Suzan Erem and Paul Durrenberger. 2008. On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5. New York: Monthly Review Press. click here for book
On the Global Waterfront tells the story of how longshoremen in South Carolina confronted attempts to wipe out the state’s most powerful black organization. When a Danish shipping company began to shift their transportation to a nonunion firm in 1999, Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized to protect their hard-won rights. What followed culminated in a protest in which 660 riot police arrayed against fifty dockworkers, a group that grew to 150 before the night was over. Four black and one white longshoreman—subsequently known as the Charleston 5—were held for twenty months under house arrest on trumped-up felony charges of inciting a riot. Within the politically conservative, racially charged, and religiously fanatic climate of the South, the unassuming local union president, Ken Riley—supported behind the scenes by a militant AFL-CIO staffer—crafted an international, grassroots campaign in defense of the arrested longshoremen. From Australia to Europe to Korea and the entire west coast of the United States, longshoremen threatened to shut down ports jeopardizing billions of dollars in trade per day. Their ultimate success vaulted Riley, and his reform-minded coworkers, to higher leadership in a notoriously corrupt union, and laid the foundation for successful rebuffs in ports around the world. On the Global Waterfront explores in detail a local conflict and in the process exposes the powers that rule the United States and the global economy. This compelling narrative of a local struggle, a transformed union leader, and a newly energized international worker movement highlights the resounding importance of the international labor movement that is not only still vital, but still capable of stopping global commerce on a dime.
Browne, Katherine E. 2004. Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning Under the
French Flag. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cohen, Jeffrey. 2004. The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Colloredo Mansfeld, Rudi. 1999. The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Earle, Timothy. 2002. Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of the Political Economy. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Edelman, Marc. 1999. Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Fisher, William. 2000. Rain Forest Exchanges: Industry and Commerce on an Amazonian Frontier. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Freeman, Carla. 2000. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work and Pink Collar Identity in the Caribbean. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Grimes, Kimberley and B. Lynne Milgram, eds. 2000. Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Gudeman, Stephen. 2001. The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hansen, Karen Transberg. 2000. Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Little, Walter. 2004. Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Mayer, Enrique. 2002. The Articulated Peasant: Household Economies in the Andes. Boulder, Colorado: Westview.
Pickering, Kathleen. 2000. Lakota Culture, World Economy. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Pospisil, Leopold. 1995. Oberbenberg, A Quantitative Analysis of a Tirolean Peasant Economy. New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Saul, Mahir and Patrick Royer. 2002. West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Smith, M. Estellie. 2000. Trade and Trade-Offs: Using Resources, Making Choice, and Taking Risks. Prospect Heights, Illinos: Waveland Press.
Trager, Lillian. 2001. Yoruba Hometowns: Community, Identity, and Development in Nigeria. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner.
I am sure that there are many other recent books about economic anthropology published by SEA members. If your book is written in 2005 or later and you would like it publicized on the website, please send us an email.
Member Web sites:
Dr. Richard Wilk’s web site.
Dr. Jeffrey Cohen’s web site on grasshoppers.
Internet Resources:
Dr. Richard Robbins’ Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism: [http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbins/legacy/]
Dr. Kate Browne’s documentary film about Katrina, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina [http://www.stillwaiting.colostate.edu/]
American Anthropological Association
[http://www.aaanet.org/]
Society for Applied Anthropology
[http://www.sfaa.net/]
